Quantum computers typically make use of quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers may be different from digital electronic computers based on transistors. For instance, whereas digital computers require data to be encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation uses quantum bits (qubits), which can be in superpositions of states.
Systems of superconducting qubits are disclosed for instance in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2012/0326720 and U.S. Publication No. 2006/0225165 and manufactured by D-Wave Systems, IBM, and Google. Such analogue systems are used for implementing quantum computing algorithms, for example, the quantum adiabatic computation proposed by Farhi et. al., “Quantum computation by adiabatic evolution” (arXiv:quant-ph/0001106) and Grover's quantum search algorithm by L. Grover, “A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search”, Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, pp. 212-219 (1996) and also explained in Dam et. al., “How Powerful is Adiabatic Quantum Computation?,” (arXiv:quant-ph/0206003), each of which is entirely incorporated herein by reference.